By Brittany Burke
The power outages affected the entire CCSU campus, from residence life, to academic classes and even the athletics department.
With the power restored to the campus, this weekend’s games going to be able to be played as scheduled, meaning that the last home football game for the graduating seniors will be held on Arute field on Saturday and the volleyball games will take place in the gymnasium.
Despite the regularity of this weekend’s games, CCSU men’s soccer has been officially changed due to the power outages. Instead of being held at 7 p.m. the Blue Devils will take on St. Francis (NY) at 12 p.m. on Friday at UHart.
“Getting the power back today was a blessing, when we got to Wednesday we started to think there’s a chance we may be out for a week and if so how are we going to deal with this, may that also mean we won’t have power over the weekend,” said Paul Schlickmann, the CCSU Athletic Director. “We had a men’s soccer game scheduled at Willow Brook on Friday, we had volleyball games scheduled here for Saturday and Sunday and we had a football game, a TV game against Robert Morris, our last home game, senior day, scheduled here for Saturday. So not knowing if we would have power and the ability to how any of those we had to start looking around.”
Had the power not been restored to the entire campus, the home games scheduled for this weekend would have been moved to Sacred Heart University. The call of whether or not to announce the location of the games was to be made this morning, but the entire campus now has power and no damage was done to the fields or Kaiser Hall.
“We went and tested everything,” said Schlickmann. “We tested the clocks on the scoreboards, we checked the same thing out at Arute, everything in the press box and the sound system … to make sure nothing was damaged. So before we said no to the contingency plans we had, we wanted to make sure we were functioning, so it’s a big relief knowing ‘okay, we’re good.’”
While things may be back to normal by Saturday for the CCSU athletics department, it has had to scramble to ensure games and practices would still be held.
Power created by the school’s generators was being directed to the dorms and Memorial Hall, which meant that places like the bubble, field lights and Kaiser were still left in the dark after losing complete power on Sunday.
As a resolution to this problem, teams such as the men’s and women’s basketball teams were sent to other schools to hold practices.
“Swimming ended up practicing at Yale for three straight days, they were very accommodating. Women’s basketball practiced Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at New Britain High School, men’s basketball practiced one day at New Britain High School and one day at Trinity College across the way,” said Schlickmann. “Volleyball practiced two days at Trinity College, so we just had our friends help us out and fortunately the Trinity campus never lost power.”
While other teams were sent off campus to practice, the weather remained nice enough for the cross country teams to continue their workouts outside. As for football, the biggest concern was getting the field cleared of snow.
Facilities had the field completely plowed by late Tuesday, which allowed the team to conduct full practices.
The power is now back on and the teams have returned to CCSU.
For some athletes such as the club hockey team, it wasn’t a matter of whether or not the Newington Arena lost power; it was about whether or not the athletes on the team would be able to make it to the practices.
The team, which normally practices Tuesday and Thursday mornings, had to cancel practice on Tuesday because of the storm. Instead, the team held an optional Wednesday practice, which only eight people were able to make. Now that the beginning stages of the storm have passed and people are beginning to get power back the team was able to hold its normally scheduled Thursday practice, and its game against Siena will go on as scheduled at 10 p.m. on Friday.
“I thought our staff was terrific, they were creative and that’s part of this business, you just kind of go with the flow and they let that flow down to the athletes,” Said Schlickmann. “The athletes were great. I think they kind of looked at it as an adventure and it’s almost been, in my view, a surreal kind of four days.”
